Looking to kickstart your creative career? A world class design education shouldn’t take forever. The Shillington Graphic Design Course takes just 3 months full-time or 1 year part-time. Most students have had no previous design experience, and come from a variety of professional backgrounds. Finance, hospitality, construction, nursing … you name it! With passion, determination and some friendly guidance from Shillington’s talented teachers, students graduate with everything they need to begin their exciting and rewarding new career in graphic design.

Find out more about the Shillington teaching method at our Info Session on Wednesday July 2 (315 Madison Avenue, 6th Floor, Manhattan). Alternatively, join us at our summer graduations on Friday July 18 for our full-time students and Friday 25 July for our part-time students where you can see their amazing student work.

Twenties is a great little project by the London-based illustrator Natalie Adkins. Taking a tongue-in-cheek look at life in your twenties, her smart image changing volvelles present one version of how life could be before quickly revealing the more-plausable truth.

In the image above a smooth Lothario asks “Your place or mine?” yet the realistic version is far less sophisticated. A quick turn of the dial presents our lover’s lady friend less than enamored by the suggestion that maybe they might want to take things back to his parents house!

The image above is called “It’s Not That People Won’t Give You The Time of Day, They Won’t Give You The Morning After” and below you can view the volvelles in action.

Natalie’s final image in the seires is called “If You Fell In The Shower and No One Was There To Hear You Fall, Would You Still Make a Sound?”. Make sure to see more of her work by visiting her website.

Over the weekend I was fortunate enough to run into this giant model of the Grand Budapest Hotel, made completely out of LEGO. This masterpiece is constructed from over 50,000 LEGO bricks and took more than 575 hours to complete. You have to admire this team for having the skill and patience to create something of this scale. Check out the video below for a behind-the-scenes look at how they did it.

Feeling unsure of your creative decisions? The team at Fuzzco have created Pocket Art Director, the perfect way to get feedback without the annoying art director breathing down your neck. They’ve cleverly thought of three experiences: one is a digital version of the die which you can try online, you can print it out, or you can buy a real life version that resembles the design-y version of something you’d find in a D&D shop. Genius.

JohnnyExpress is the title of a wonderfully funny animated short by Alfred ImageWorks; an animation and motion graphics company from Korea. Set in the year 2150, it tells the tale of Johnny – a lazy delivery man responsible for dropping off parcels on planets throughout the galaxy. As Johnny awakes from sleep with a new package to deliver, he soon discovers that this simple delivery may be harder than he had hoped. Things quickly go from bad to worse and hilarity ensues.

The animation is brilliant but what really got me is the short’s wit and charm. They say that the secret to good comedy is timing, and if that’s true then JohnnyExpress is most certainly a really great comedy! If you have time, make sure to put five minutes aside today and go check it out. I’m certain that you’ll enjoy it!

Unicode, the official keepers of emojis, announced yesterday that they’ll be adding around 250 new emojis. The Washington Post has a pretty complete list of what you should be seeing and I’m personally excited for a weight lifter, derelict house building, man in business suit levitating, clamshell mobile phone, reversed hand with middle finger extended, and dagger knife. Unfortunately they didn’t bother to put in important stuff like multi-ethnic emojis so that it’s not a bunch of white people.

New York-based Canadian artist Aurora Robson makes some amazing sculptures and installations. Described as a “subtle yet determined environmental activist”, her work is made from everyday waste such as junk mail and discarded plastic bottles. Her resulting creations look like strange alien-beings or bizarre creatures from the deep. I love them!

Behind her organic forms lies some incredibly intricate work. Often lit by solar-powered LEDs; her sculptures are immense – taking over entire galleries and filling rooms with bizarre forms and shapes. At the core of what she does is a hope to raise awareness about plastic waste.

You can find out more about her practice in the video below or visit her website for more images and examples of her work.

There’s a nice interview over on The New York Times Bits blog with Jonny Ive where he speaks about the culture of Apple and how it’s remained unchanged since Steve Jobs’ passing. Below is my favorite part where he speaks about the importance of focusing on the product you’re trying to build, and I think it’s really great advice that I try to follow in my day job.

One of the values of things I learned absolutely directly from Steve was the whole issue of focus. What are we focusing on: focus on product. I wish I could do a better job in communicating this truth here, which is when you really are focused on the product, that’s not a platitude. When that truly is your reason for coming into the studio, is just to try to make the very best product you can, when that is exclusive of everything else, it’s remarkable how insignificant or unimportant a lot of other stuff becomes. Titles or organizational structures, that’s not the lens through which we see our peers.